As some of you will no doubt be aware AMD finally released their new crimson based driver not long ago to much fanfare and hype. Sadly the first release they put out had an extremely nasty bug present which would basically prevent your GPU fans from exceeding their default 20% spin up rate meaning if you went from idle to playing a game your fans would no longer be able to counter this and wouldn't increase to balance out the added fan speed demand 3D graphics require sending GPU temperatures soaring.

If like myself you use MSI Afterburner this does tend to do it all for you automatically but even after uninstalling said crimson driver as soon as I was told this bug was present things had just not been right. The first time I noticed I had an issue at all was when someone pointed out that the clocks on my GPU in a screenshot I took were all wrong...

If you look at the top of the picture you can clearly see my cards default clock speeds of 945mhz and 1400mhz have been down clocked to just 470mhz and 700mhz. Even now I can't actually believe I didn't notice this as I spent at least an hour trying to get Just Cause 3 to run as it should with the clock speeds way below what they should have been.

Now after having installed an older and more stable/reliable driver I had slowly started noticing that my GPU temps had increased to close to 70c when they would normally be sat at around 56-59c. Next I started seeing my games suddenly just black screen randomly. Tonight however while attempting to play Dirt Rally my machine completely shut itself down even though I could see the clocks were correct, the temps were at just 59c and my fps was sitting pretty at 59-60fps. For a while I thought I was in the clear but using the card tonight has now proved otherwise.

Since then removing the crimson driver it's now clear to me that some damage was most certainly done to my card a card that might I add was brand new only 12 months ago and had worked perfectly right up until I tried gaming with the crimson drivers. I thought I was lucky enough at first to have dodged a bullet but it looks now like I acted too little too late as I'm sure the vram on my card has been partially if not severely damaged by them.

So here I am giving others fair warning that if you still have the crimson driver or even the hotfix driver installed on your machine think twice about keeping them installed if you spot any kind of irregularities happening while gaming, any at all. Lose the drivers. Don't lose your card.

I will be contacting AMD directly concerning this matter and have now already preordered a brand new AMD 380X 4GB card to replace this one. You can bet your arse I won't be going anywhere near crimson driver releases again though. If ever there was a time I've questioned my own loyalty towards AMD who I have followed and supported for nigh on twenty years this is pretty much it. This may now be my final AMD purchase as releasing a driver that has this kind of detrimental effect on its customer base is frankly unforgivable and utterly inexcusable.

Yep NG I did. I rebooted using the latest DDU and was sure to clean out the registry and folders before installing anything new, a practice I've done for years. Any issues only ever began once crimson was installed and rebooted on my system.

AMD's big Crimson Edition driver launched a few weeks ago with many major changes and feature additions. As is often the case with significant releases such as this, there have been problems. First there was the fan speed issue, and now reports have surfaced about an underclocking issue caused by the driver.

Asked about the issue on Twitter, AMD yesterday stated it's aware of it and investigating. The fan issue was resolved very quickly with a hotfix driver, so the same is likely here. In the meantime, if you find yourself experiencing it and/or stutter in games, AMD says you can get around it by reverting to Catalyst 15.11.1 Beta or 15.7.1 WHQL drivers.

Terry Pratchett wrote:Humans would do anything to see if it was possible. If you put a large switch in a cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying 'End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH', the paint wouldn't even have time to dry.